Flower Park

Flower Park covers 134.7 acres and the county records 346 parcels and 313 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 6,250 square feet. Eighteen named streets run 5.01 miles within it, First through Sixth Streets crossing Flower St, Lowell St, Freeman St, Olive St and Coach Dick Hill Way. The zoning layer gives 36.1 acres to government center and 21.7 acres to professional, with 17.6 acres of single family residence and 8.5 acres of two family residence.

That split runs through the general plan too, 39.8 acres as low density residential against 39.2 acres as institutional. Two city facilities sit inside the boundary: Santa Ana Stadium, a special use facility of 7 acres with a soccer field, sports lighting, a concession stand and off street parking, and Angels Community Park at 1.6 acres with a ball diamond, a basketball court and a playground. Thirteen properties inside the boundary sit on the city historic register.

Flower Park sits directly west of the original town. William Spurgeon paid Jacob Ross, Sr. $595 for 74.2 acres in 1869 and had George Wright lay out a 24 block townsite on December 13, 1870, running from First Street north to Seventh and from what is now Broadway east to Spurgeon Street. Ross had bought more than 2,000 acres of the former Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana from the Yorba family the year before, and it was his land that Spurgeon turned into a town. Everything a few blocks further west, along Flower, Baker, Shelton and the numbered streets, filled in as the town spilled past those first lines. The Pacific Electric red car reached Fourth Street in 1906 and West Fourth built out quickly after that, which is why the middle of the housing here dates to 1922 and why more homes stand from the 1910s than from any other decade.

Bristol Street, the western edge, was still called Newport Road as late as 1891. By 1894 it was Bristol, named for Henry Richard Bristol, a druggist who came from Illinois in 1882 and ran the Bristol and Rowley drug store from a two story building at Fourth and Main. Thirteen properties inside the neighborhood are carried on the City of Santa Ana's register of historic properties, including the Shelton-Garnsey House on West Fifth Street, the Busy Bee Market on West Third, the Thorp-Navarro House on West Second and the Ward House on West Sixth.